He ceased to speak, and his blue eyes were filled with pious veneration as he looked at the château, a sedate and grandiose structure in Mansart's very earliest manner. In the eighteenth century a Claviers-Grandchamp, to whom a friend, in gratitude for a service rendered him, had bequeathed a fortune made in the Compagnie des Indes, had reconstructed it inside without touching the façade. In front lay an immense garden _à la française_. Twelve gardeners were required to keep up this marvel, laid out in flower-beds, ponds and tree-lined paths, with many bronze groups about the ponds, and stone statues in the paths. In that closing hour of a lovely day, in that atmosphere now so delicately tinged with gray, the garden was a beautiful sight. Like those of Versailles, and of the whole seventeenth century, it bore the physiognomy of nature respected in its strength and at the same time guided, regulated and harmonized in its expansions. It was in truth visible "order," the order of the society of olden time whence the Claviers-Grandchamps had sprung. The trees, which were still vigorous, but pruned and trimmed, did not put forth their leaves until they had been disciplined. At the close of this conversation, Landri's wounded sensibility found a symbol of his destiny in the aspect of that garden. He, too, like those trees, bore witness to the effects of discipline. No more than they could he develop freely. He should never marry Valentine,--M. de Claviers reasoned too justly. She would never enter a noble family without the consent of its head. The allusion made by the far-sighted and implacable marquis to the possibilities of his military career, finished freezing his heart. What should he do, in either case? The tree in the hedge which pushes its branches beyond the line fixed by the gardener destroys the fine ensemble, and it will never bloom. It retains the marks of the hatchet that pruned it. In the hedge they added to its beauty. They are a mutilation when it stands by itself. Such is the fate of the member of a caste who cuts loose from it and essays to live for himself. But nobility, great houses, caste, mésalliances,--were not all these ideas a mere phantasmagoria, a superstition, the imaginary residuum of an abolished reality, an absurd anachronism in the France of to-day?--Away from his father the son would have answered yes. He could not do it at that moment, in that carriage where he could hear the slightest movement and the very breathing of that man, so intensely alive, who imparted to his beliefs that ardent flame of his individual life which gave them their inspiration. The prestige of his father's presence acted anew upon Landri, with such force that he could not even blame the paternal determination, against which he would rebel to-morrow, but at a distance,--and he fell into a fit of melancholy which M. de Claviers finally observed. With his temperament the "Émigré" was most worthy to utter the words of Don Diego, savage and